Not just delivery in the restaurant industry, and not just booking portals for hotels. As confirmed by the exhibition path of Host 2023, at Fieramilano in Rho from 13th to 17th October, digital technologies are becoming increasingly diverse and are increasingly established as enabling factors across various sectors.

And we shoud start with the mantra of the day: artificial intelligence. Many of us have already tried playing with ChatGPT, but what can a generative artificial intelligence do professionally in the hospitality sector? For instance, hotels can potentially save significant amounts of money, eliminate human error, and provide superior customer support, enabling practically limitless opportunities to offer a more personalized experience. On the back-office side, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can perform repetitive tasks more quickly and with fewer errors.

And on a more hardware level, today, quality hospitality cannot do without domotics. It’s not just about offering guests fun gadgets like the ability to control the air conditioner with their voice. Besides providing automation to make the stay more comfortable, home automation allows, for example, the identification of guests and staff through devices in rooms and common areas, ensuring maximum security for everyone. From a management perspective, a domotics system enables the automatic delivery of services even when absent, contributing to a reduction in energy waste, resulting in savings on utility bills, and saving valuable staff time.

However, technology is often highly effective without being so flashy. Cloud-based POS systems, for example, implement and store customer data on the cloud and are often offered in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, making them not only accessible remotely via the Internet but also more cost-effective.

Chatbots are another example of how AI is influencing the industry: programs with a human-like interface that provide automatic but smart information by processing previous customer responses.

Still at the intersection of hardware and software, experts in the industry warn that in the coming years, we will see an increasing number of interactive screens, augmented and virtual reality applications, as well as a more pervasive use of QR Codes.

The future of hospitality is digital, and the most interesting solutions will be at Host 2023, in the Furniture-Technology sector.